App Engine is a pretty dramatic thought departure for lots of programmers who are used to writing an app that runs on a single server and access a single database. Case in point, there has been a recurring topic of auto-increment fields on the App Engine list — people trying to implement their own version of it since it is not a native datastore type.

Using an auto-increment field is not the way to go. It is viable when you only have 1 database but the datastore for your app is going to/can be replicated out to other machines. This would mean that their exists times, when datastore’ != datastore” — over time datastore’ would be sync’d with datastore” so that datastore’ == datastore” — this would lead one to believe that there will be times when the idea of an auto-increment field will not be synchronizable or that the result of the synchronization would be less than satisfactory. My belief that auto-increment fields are the wrong idea in this environment is strengthened by the fact that they are not offered as an intrinsic datatype.

Noah Gift over on O’Reilly OnLamp Blog has an article on building a greedy coin changer. That is, given a value, say 71 cents, calculate the fewest coins needed to make the amount. He had listed a number of solutions, but I felt I could do it a bit more pythonic. ðŸ˜‰

Now this is truly an interesting development. Google’s just announcedApp Engine is sure to super-charge the Python community and convert a number of disillusioned developers of other languages in to Pythonistas. There have been lots of interesting comments floating in the blogosphere about what this could mean.

I think it is a great opportunity on a smaller scale than anyone might imagine. Sure, this could serve as the platform for the next YouTube type social-2.x site, but what I think this really means, is that Google is rounding out the Google Apps for Domains by giving the ability to create something more than a brochure-ware style site offered by their current Sites for Google Apps.

Many are looking for Google to use this as an opportunity to expand advertising revenue, and that is certainly possible for widely popular webX.x sites but what they really needed is another tool/knife to hold to the competition’s throats. Looking at the tea leaves in the bottom of my glass, I see something more akin to a SharePoint attack; Going after the S in SMB market.

App Engine allows for authenticating users via Google system, how much longer until we can interact with other Google services in a similar fashion?? Calendaring, GTalk, etc — I’m not talking mashups, something much more refined.